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The 7th Conference and Members’ Meeting of the European Society for Prevention Research (EUSPR) took place in Berlin, Germany from 31st October to the 2nd November 2016. As in the previous year, the EUSPR Early Careers Forum (ECF) was represented at the conference with an early-careers event on every day of the conference, including:

This year, we also offered members of the Early Careers Forum the possibility to participate in the abstract review process, so as to help them develop their own abstract writing skills as well as to gain insights into what happens “behind the scenes” once an abstract is submitted.

The EUSPR generously sponsored 15 bursaries to support early-career preventionists with attending the conference, as well as the pre-conference workshop and the lunch during our networking event – many thanks!!

The European Society for Prevention Research (EUSPR) Members’ Meeting took place on 31st October 2016 in Berlin, Germany, prior to the Society’s annual conference. Angelina Brotherhood informed the EUSPR Membership about the activities of the Early Careers Forum in its second year, covering the time span from October 2015 to October 2016. You can view the activity report below or download it here. Continue reading →

We know you’re busy packing and making your ways to airports and train stations right now, so to make your life at least a little bit easier, here’s an overview of our events to help you plan your conference attendance: Continue reading →

In this month’s blog post, Sanela Talič will share her experience in her work as a prevention scientist. Sanela is the Head of Prevention at Institute for Research and Development UTRIP in Slovenia and currently also a PhD student of prevention science at University of Zagreb. In this blog, she will address the importance of acknowledging prevention research as a distinct science.

The year 2006, the time when I first entered the field of prevention. When I look back, it was like a love at first sight. But beginnings are often not easy. Imagine a baby taking his first steps. Awkward steps, lots of downs and ups but determined to continue mainly due to the richness of this field. People I met at this “first stage” of my prevention career were talking in specific jargon and I admit… back then a special “prevention dictionary” would have saved me from unenviable situations. Often I was giving the impression that I totally understand them and agree with them but at the same time there was only one question in my head: “For God’s sake, what are these people talking about?” But that didn’t stop me from “digging deeper” as I wanted to broaden my horizons. Because very soon I realised that prevention is one of those fields where learning never ends. Continue reading →

Maria Rosaria Galanti is a Professor in Public Health Epidemiology at the Karolinska Institutet, Sweden. In this article, she provides her insights into the seven “deadly sins” that she feels she could have avoided as an early career researcher.

And suddenly I was full-time in research… September 1992, 38 years old and an honorable career as a Medical Doctor behind me. Three and a half years later I was a graduate, thereafter a licensed researcher and with time a respected member of one of the most prestigious medical universities in the world. All this went so quickly that I did not have the time to consider my mistakes or to complain for what I could have done better.

Rebecca Crook is a postgraduate researcher at the Public Health Institute at Liverpool John Moores University in the UK. In this blog post, she describes her recent experience of organising a one-day symposium for postgraduate researchers and shares her lessons learnt for others who might find themselves in a similar position.

The following blog post is a reflection on my recent role as Symposium Director for the 2nd Public Health PhD Symposium at Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU). I chose to focus on this topic for the blog hoping that it might encourage other postgraduate and early career researchers if they are considering organising a networking event, and give some hints and tips along the way.

The invitation

The idea for the ‘Public Health PhD Symposium’ came about last year. Following a successful event in April 2015, it was decided that this would become an annual affair organised by a student from the Public Health Institute (PHI) at LJMU. Earlier this year the Director of the PHI, Jim McVeigh, approached me and asked if I would be interested in organising this summer’s symposium. Having attended and presented at the event last April, I accepted and looked forward to taking on this new role. Continue reading →

This month’s contribution comes from Martha Canfield, who is a researcher at the National Addiction Centre, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King’s College in London, UK. In this blog, she describes her research about substance use of Brazilian migrants in the UK, and how acculturation is associated with this behavior.

I am taking the opportunity to describe here some of the findings from my PhD research which explored the extent to which the process of acculturation is placing Brazilian migrants in the UK at risk for substance use1. Although this study looked at a population of Brazilians aged 18 and over residing in the UK, it presents findings that have the potential to be translated to other migratory groups, younger populations of migrants and minority ethnic groups, and to different contexts (e.g. countries).

Dr Emma Davies is a lecturer in the Department of Psychology, Social Work and Public Health at Oxford Brookes University. In this article, she provides some reflections on alcohol free events, such as sober raves, as a topic for research in drug and alcohol misuse.

Background

Strategies for reducing drug and alcohol misuse tend to focus on encouraging people to either stop or cut down in order to reduce harms. But substance use is often driven by the pursuit of pleasure, rather than by the avoidance of harm (Global Drug Survey, 2015; Hutton, 2012), and drugs and alcohol are present in many social situations. People are very often already aware of the risks associated with their behaviour, but on balance they decide it is worth the risk to have a good time. Furthermore, and especially in social situations where alcohol is flowing, people’s good intentions often fail to map onto their behaviours (Sheeran, 2002).

We hope you have enjoyed the first couple of months of our EUSPR Early Careers Forum blog. We certainly have!

It has been a great experience for us receiving and reading our contributors’ submissions. So here’s a big thank-you to all our contributors so far for sending us really interesting posts, and on time! 🙂

We hope you’ll agree with us that the blog has already managed to fulfil its aim of providing a platform where early career members of the European Society for Prevention Research (EUSPR) can present themselves and their work online, as well as openly share their thoughts on the fields of prevention policy, research and practice. We hope it will continue to do this for a while yet.

What you may not realise is that there is a lot of work going into each individual post, as contributors thoughtfully prepare their posts and our small editorial team reviews draft submissions and provides feedback. As of June, we are therefore switching our publishing frequency to once a month (previously every two weeks). This should allow us to maintain the high quality that you’ve come to expect of our blog posts by now.

So, please continue to come back every month or so to check out our latest post, and if you have any feedback on the blog, or you would like to submit a blog post yourself or join our editorial team, please get in touch with Angelina Brotherhood at a.brotherhood@ljmu.ac.uk.

In today’s contribution, Miriam Blikmans, research master student at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, shares some thoughts on how she has experienced the gap between the worlds of research and practice during her first year in the academic world.

How it all began

My first serious encounter with research took place while I was conducting my bachelor thesis abroad. During a period of three months, the University of Örebro in Sweden gave me the opportunity to take a look into the world of research. I learned a lot: how to come to an innovative research topic, how to conduct more advanced statistical techniques, but most of all it taught me the power of research. During my study on the effectiveness of parenting programs for children with externalizing behaviour, I found that the reduction in children’s problem behaviour was partly due to a decrease in parenting stress. Although being overall effective, not all families benefit from these programs. I thought this insight into parenting stress as a working mechanism might help increase the effectiveness of these parenting programmes and therefore it could make a difference in the lives of certain families. Of course, I was a little naive Continue reading →